Recruitment of remote employees requires you to find new ways of attracting, interviewing, and onboarding your workforce. Read on to discover some useful tips to succeed in the process of hiring employees remotely!
The biggest change that the global pandemic COVID-19 has brought to the fore is how people work. With millions of people having to isolate themselves, companies have had to rethink their operational strategies to keep going.
A key strategy that most business leaders and executives have embraced is remote working. In the US, a survey by Seyfarth found that 67% of employers have asked onsite employees to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis.
But remote working did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic. It just got triggered by the current crisis to the extent that this working mechanism has now become the new normal. This means that if you need to hire new talent for your business, you should be prepared to do so remotely.
Remote recruitment has many benefits. Here are just some of them! Remote recruitment allows you to:
Remote recruitment provides a way to conquer the challenges Covid-19 poses for your business. It helps you stay afloat and relevant by attracting and retaining talented employees.
Technology is at the heart of remote recruitment. To source, screen, interview, and hire employees virtually, you need the right recruitment tools that enable you to connect with potential employees from different geographic locations.
But is technology enough? Not, really! Remote recruitment also requires you to refabricate your strategies, equip yourself with the right skills, and alter your recruitment styles. Keep reading to learn about the tips and tricks that can turn you into a remote recruitment expert! 🏆
Recruitment of remote employees requires you to find new ways of attracting, interviewing, and onboarding your workforce. Read on to discover some useful tips to succeed in the process:
When hiring new employees, you need to be clear on their competency levels, along with the responsibilities you want them to undertake. When thinking about core competencies, consider the skills employees require to work remotely with the same effectiveness as they would when working in an office.
Check their educational backgrounds, the previous experience they hold, and the kind of training they have received till now to understand how good they are in their respective fields. This will give you an idea of whether a candidate is fit for a particular role.
Besides, remote working also requires a completely new set of skills. Identify general remote working competencies that will provide you a benchmark to evaluate candidates better during the process.
When hiring remotely, there are certain skills and qualities that you need to pay close attention to, such as:
Regardless of which role you are hiring for, these skills are more or less mandatory to survive in the new work environment.
The purpose of a job ad is to give applicants a holistic understanding of what a remote job entails. So, ensure that your job description is engaging, realistic, short, and at the same time, attention-grabbing.
When creating a job ad for a remote position, be transparent regarding the role and responsibilities, and clearly convey the nature of the job - remote working in this case.
A remote job ad should have the following:
Identify strategies for getting the job ad to potential candidates. The best way to do this is through the use of job boards like FlexJobs, WeWorkRemotely, and Indeed. You can also leverage your company's blog and social media platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook to post job ads and answer questions that candidates might have.
Show potential applicants what working in your company will be like using career blog content ideas or by including videos showcasing your company culture in your social media content.
Once the application phase closes, shift your attention to screening and shortlisting the most qualified candidates from the pool of applications received. This is the most difficult part of the remote hiring process for 52% of hiring teams.
The best way of making this process easier is by using online recruitment software (such as TalentLyft! 😉). Recruitment CRM enables you to organize and manage job applications easily to avoid mix-up and ensure none of them falls through the cracks.
Fast track the screening process by having a criterion that captures the key qualifications your ideal candidates must have. You can do this quickly by picking the core competencies from the job description.
Ensure that you evaluate candidates on hard skills as well as soft skills. Start by judging role-specific qualities and slowly move towards the soft skills such as the candidate's cognitive ability, personality, and cultural fit to determine how good a fit he or she can be in your team.
With the criteria in place, use the recruitment software to bring the relevant applications to a centralized platform where you can screen and shortlist them in one go. This will make the screening process easier and faster.
Once you have your list of shortlisted candidates, you'll need to:
And if they pass your mini-test, take them on a video call for the real interview. This is precisely what we are going to discuss in our next point.
Interviews are an important part of the hiring process because they give you a chance to better understand candidates. As you cannot indulge in in-person interviews, video interviewing provides a way out. It helps you pick up non-verbal cues during the interview and assess candidates in real time.
There are many different video interviewing platforms that can help your organization recruit remotely. This new-age recruitment technique is only going to be more prevalent with time. Here are some useful hacks to be well-prepared for virtual interviews:
Be as prepared as you would be for a face-to-face interview. Have your hiring team join the interview session early. To connect with candidates better, practice active listening and keep your eyes on the camera to maintain eye contact.
Communication is an essential aspect of the hiring process. It is the glue that binds everything together from the time you launch your recruitment process to the time you onboard employees remotely and assist them every step of the way.
Good communication ensures that your hiring process is transparent and credible. Throughout the hiring process, you will be communicating internally with various teams and externally with potential candidates.
The best way to keep things transparent is to adopt a multi-channel communication approach. Rather than relying on a single communication channel, your communication is more effective when you use a mix of emails, phone calls, video calls, and text messages.
Determine which communication channels to use for specific situations. For instance, you can use email to send the offer letter to the selected candidate, text messages to inform candidates of something urgent, and phone calls to communicate the timelines in the hiring process.
Videos can be used for interviewing candidates, as discussed above. Also, considering the anxious moments, your job candidates could be going through, be emphatic in your communication, across all channels.
Employee onboarding involves orienting and training new employees to familiarize them with your organization and the team they will be a part of. It is an integral part of any hiring process. Unlike the traditional onboarding process where you conduct offline training sessions, remote recruitment requires you to embrace online onboarding.
Besides saving you a significant amount of time, this technique also helps you cut down the frivolous training expenses such as booking a conference hall, making arrangements for the conveyance of new employees, and costs related to food, beverage, and much more.
To provide remote employees with a pleasant onboarding experience and help them settle in their new roles, all you need is the right onboarding tool. For instance, you can use knowledge base software to create an employee handbook that comprises information about your company, work policies, HR policies, different teams and divisions, and much more.
Employees can then use this handbook to make themselves abreast of your firm, policies, and the new responsibilities they will be taking. Besides, you can also have training courses embedded in this handbook, so that new hires can access them conveniently whenever they get time.
To improve the overall onboarding experience, you can conduct onboarding surveys to collect feedback on the handbook's quality and whether it gives employees an end-to-end understanding of your company. Based on the inputs received, enhance the quality of your online handbook, keeping it relevant to what your new employees need.
Remote working provides more benefits than you can imagine, and that's the reason employees love it. Given the current situation and the fact that people have actually started liking this new work system, we can't predict what the future holds. As of now, all we can assume is that remote working is going to stay for the foreseeable future.
In times like these, remote recruitment is something that can help you stay afloat and tap the unique talent of individuals across the world to keep your operations going. In addition to the six tips discussed above, improve your remote recruitment success by preparing responses to the possible questions that employees might ask.
Because the remote working environment is different from the traditional office environment, remote workers will raise issues that onsite employees will not. Be prepared to respond to those issues when they arise.
Opt for people who mesh well with your company culture, especially when hiring employees for a long time. Remote employees who share similar work ethics and fit well in your team are likely to be more productive than those that don't.
Brayn Wills currently holds the position of knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.
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